The fact that infants in both groups preferred part-words, as did infants in Experiment 1A, further supports this conclusion. It should provoke great after dinner discussion - not only on the histories of the words it contains but on wider questions of language. During the infants’ exposure to the artificial language, both words and part-words occurred equally often. Further, they are able to learn a trochaic bias through exposure to a set of words that follow a consistent trochaic pattern. Unlike the white spaces between words on the written page, pauses do not consistently mark word boundaries in fluent speech.

From the 'porcelain' on the table to the 'coin' in the Christmas pudding and the 'alcohol' poured over it, the book is an enlightening and amusing read.

The pitch contour varied as a function of whether the syllable began with a voiced or a voiceless consonant. First, it provides a cue that allows infants to segment words from fluent speech, even without language-specific phonological knowledge. For example, infants accept words from the synthesized speech in English utterances after exposure to a stream of synthesized speech ( Saffran, 2001). Very highly recommended, and yes, in almost every way, Discovering Numbers presents a truly and wonderfully perfect first book of letters for the very young (and perhaps even for anyone interested in a simple and brightly illustrated introduction to twenty-six English, Cree and French nouns). indicating that infants exposed to both languages listened for similar times to words and part-words.

The 5-month-olds in Experiments 1 and 2 are able to segment words from fluent speech via sensitivity to conditional statistical information, opening the possibility that sensitivity to conditional statistical cues plays a role in learning from a very young age (c. Similar in both construction and style to its companion book Discovering Numbers, Discovering Words is also and equally simple and basic, but indeed and in fact absolutely and utterly brilliant in and with its very simplicity (a triple-language primary level alphabet board book in English, French and Cree for young children just learning their letters). g., Fiser and Aslin, 2005), suggesting that this extraction is a domain-general aspect of conditional statistical learning. Once infants detect this distributional regularity, it alters their segmentation of subsequent speech (e.

Variance in spelling, (the bugbear of the average SATS-pressured primary school child) is discussed - proving that English is a long way from a dead language.